The Standards of the Vístula Lancers

This prestigious body of light cavalry was made up of about 1000 men,
all of Polish nationality, distributed in four squadrons of two companies,
commanded by Colonel J. Konopka. Although the name of Vistula Legion
was given to them by the Emperor on the 2nd March 1808, in fact its
origins went back to the 8th September 1799 when it was created as the
"Regiment of Lancers of the Polish Legion of the Danube",
which in 1801 took the name of the "Regiment of Polish Lancers"
and in 1807 that of "Lancers of the Italian Polish Legion".

Its showy and unmistakable uniform consisted of trousers and short
jacket of turquoise-blue cloth, with yellow collar, facings and lapels
and silver-plated buttons. Their helmets were the typical Polish chatska,
in this case yellow, and each lancer carried a small arsenal consisting
of his lance with red and white guidon, sabre, two pistols and a carbine.

As far as the regiment’s standards went, it continued using the four
republican standards of the Polish Legion which it had received in 1800
in Italy from the hands of the then First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte.
They had refused to replace them in 1805 with new ones which were in
conformity with the new imperial iconography.

Obverse of the Guidon of
the 2nd Squadron in Sevilla Cathedral

Reverse of the Guidon of
the 2nd Squadron in Sevilla Cathedral

The Lancers in Spain

The Lancers entered the Peninsula via Roncesvalles on the 28th May
1808, arriving at Pamplona on the 31st. They left on the 5th June, heading
in the direction of Zaragoza with the French punitive column detailed
to occupy this city and punish its rebellious inhabitants. En route
they overcame the Aragonese successively at Tudela, Mallén and Alagón
on the 8th, 13th and 14th of June, and on the 15th were able to gallop
into the city of Zaragoza, but were ejected from the city the same day.
They then joined the beseiging troops until the 14th August, when they
all withdrew in the direction of Navarre. On the 23rd November
they fought again at Tudela, and after this victory the bulk of the
regiment was transferred towards the centre of the country, leaving
before Zaragoza, during its second siege, only a detachment of thirty-three
men and horses who were detailed to form Junot’s escort and later Lannes’.

The Disaster of Los Yébenes

On the 20th March 1809 the Lancers left Toledo with the rest of General
Sebastiani’s troops en route for the Sierra Morena, and on the afternoon
of the 23rd they arrived at the town of Los Yébenes, while the infantry
and artillery were near Mora.

That night the sentries heard suspicious sounds and informed the Colonel,
"but he calmed all his officers, assuring them that the enemy
was several days march from here, near the Guadiana river",
but he was mistaken, since facing him and hidden by the fog was the
new Army of La Mancha, commanded by Count de Cartaojal, who at seven
in the morning mounted an attacking front against the Lancers, who at
that moment had just got out of bed.

The Colonel managed to form his men at the entrance to the town, but
as soon as he realised his clear numerical inferiority he ordered the
withdrawal of the whole regiment by the only road possible, which was
a climbing, narrow and winding track which led to Orgaz. Shortly before
this the carts and baggage of the Regiment had started to retreat along
this road, being unaware that that the Carabineros Reales of the Vizconde de Zolina’s cavalry had been posted
on this road, waiting for them.

Their march had hardly begun when the Lancers encountered their own
wagons returning in disorder pursued by the Carabineros, and in this situation, attacked at the front and in the
rear on a narrow road, the Colonel had his men make a desperate charge,
managing to break the ranks of the Spanish cavalry who blocked their
route, and saved a good number of his men, although not their carts,
which were left on the road. Shortly afterwards General Valence’s Polish
infantry arrived from Mora to help him. At the moment both forces met,
the following scene took place, which is related by one of its direct
participants, the officer Wojciechowski:

"When I jumped off my mount, I took Kazaban to one side and
asked him why our Colonel, always so brave and perspicacious in all
the previous combats, had completely lost his head today, and was
complaining to our General about how our regiment was lost. He did
not understand these complaints, because he was sure that the whole
regiment was out of danger. Kazaban took a deep breath, took my hand
and said to me,

‘You are probably right, and our regiment is out
of danger, but nevertheless something worse has happened. We have
lost the standard of our regiment, the emblem we received in Italy
many years ago during the French revolution. The emblem that Napoleón
wanted to change when he became Emperor and the regiment opposed,
because it felt so strongly about it: this emblem was our four standards.’

‘What the devil are you telling me?’ I shouted. ‘I am sure that
we left them in the depot at Madrid!’

‘Yes’, he said, ‘the covers and the poles have gone, but I put
the standards with my own hands, in the greatest secrecy, in a saddlebag
that was in the Colonel’s wagon. That wagon was left on the other
side of the big mountain and I am sure it has been captured by the
Spaniards’.

I was stunned. I knew the consequences of this accident for the
whole regiment. In this case our regiment would merely exist, and
we Lancers, no matter how brave we might be, would be deprived of
all reward or promotion".

Indeed, the Regiment had lost its four standards, which was serious
enough in itself, but to make matters worse we had disobeyed a superior
order, according to which they should have been left in Madrid in a
safe place. As a result of this the Regiment was deprived of the right
to receive new standards, even after Albuera (16-V-1811), at which it
managed "heroically" to take six British infantry flags in
the course of a “legendary" charge.

The Regiment merely existed in this way in Seville, by Imperial decree
of the 18th June 1811 serving as base for the new 7th Lancers Regiment
(Chevaux-Légers-Lanciers).

Destiny of the trophies

The official report of the action, written by Cartaojal on the 29th
and published in the Gazette of the 1st of April, related the losses
suffered by the Lancers:

"98 prisoners and 3 officers, and they left in our possession
a standard, horses, lances and equipment".

And a later note directed by Cartaojal to the Supreme Junta of Seville
added

"to have taken two standards of the Polish Regiment at Los
Yébenes, found in the bag of an officer who died on the battlefield".

We see that Cartaojal took three of the four standards and that two
of them were in the possession of an officer who, knowing of their presence,
had tried to save them, dying in the attempt. The rest must have been
destroyed, hidden among the rest of the convoy, without anybody being
aware of their existence.

What happened to these three standards between then and the reappearance
of two of them in the Royal Chapel of San Fernando in Seville Cathedral
is not clear, but with the support of the few existing documents I will
venture the following hypothesis:

The three must have remained in the hands of the Army Staff, without
being deposited in a church or making some such special show of them,
until the battle of Albuera (16-V-1811). In this famous action the infantry
of our English allies was “massacred" by the Vístula Lancers –
exactly the Regiment which had lost their standards at Los Yébenes and
which since then had been without emblems. It must have been then that
the Spanish command decided to bring those forgotten trophies to light,
turning them into trophies of Albuera, with the consequent boost to
morale for our troops, who had been unfairly forgotten by our allies
in their official reports.

In this respect we can see that “the taking of the Polish standard
by the Regiment of Murcia” which Lardizabal mentions in his report
of the battle, is unbelievable, because there was no standard and the
General Staff spoke of the taking of a total of three trophies, but
it does not explain the circumstances in which these were taken, nor
were we able to find any reference to the lost standard in any of the
detailed French regimental information.

Seven days later D. Sebastian Llano,
General Blake’s aide-de-camp, appeared before the Cortes of Cadiz with
one of these trophies – the standard of the third squadron, according
to our hypothesis - saying that "of three flags that
were taken by the enemy, I have the honor to present this to Your Excellencies
as a tribute due to the Nation that you represent". This was
deposited in the church of San Felipe Neri, and its trail is lost soon
afterwards.

As far as the two remaining, they must have been offered to the Royal
Chapel of San Fernando as soon as this city was reconquered in 1812,
and must be the standards of the 1st and 2nd Squadrons, but up to now
our attempts to finding the record of their deposit in the Chapel's
office have been fruitless.

In 1889, J. Gestoso, under the title "National Glories",
published a color plate of the standard of the first squadron "that
is kept in the Royal Chapel of San Fernando of this city",
but he erroneously identifies it as "coming from the battle
of Bailén" . The following year the same author, in his "Tourist
and Monumental Seville", mentions the two Polish standards in the
Royal Chapel, but again connects them to Bailén, not knowing that the
Lancers did not fight in that battle, and that in addition, all those
trophies were recaptured by King Joseph when he occupied the city in
1810.

Guidon of the 1st Squadron, once in Sevilla,
and Today in Paris

At the moment only the standard of the 2nd Squadron is kept in the
Main Office of the Seville Cathedral, because that of the 1st passed,
by bloodthirsty means, around 1910, to the Musée de l'Armee (Paris),
in whose stores it is at the moment, framed between two panes of glass
and lacking any reference to its having been taken by the Spanish.